Monday, June 11, 2018

The Healing Aspect of Negation

[First posted 2/4/06]

"All it takes to fly is to hurl yourself at the ground...and miss."

(From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) Douglas Adams — Life, the Universe, and Everything

Years ago, in my early teens, I was given instruction by some Risen guides. This astral experience was powerful and impressionable, but it did not seem applicable to my life as it was then. The memory of the instruction faded, only to come back to me at particularly stressful times in my life. While it is quite true that, as a powerful, positive experience it gave me strength at such times, it has only been recently that I've come to see that it also played a role in eventually guiding me to comprehend "negation" and the use of it in my manifested earthly experience. The sharing of my comprehension here may be but a small, faint light in this veiled world, yet my wish is that I might be able to share this in some way that may resonate for others and aid them in their own transmutation and eventual transition.

Briefly, the instruction was on changing my form from a human to that of a dragon. I wasn't shown how, or given advice, but simply told to "do." (Remember Yoda?) I did everything—from wrinkling my brow, to crossing my eyes, holding my breath, forcing my mind to "do it." Nothing worked. It seemed impossible.

I continued to receive the directive "just do it" over and over, stronger and stronger. The pressure became such that I forgot about the fact that I was not a dragon, which then ended the pressure, and suddenly, I had negated any thought — which as words might look like "*****" — and I was at once a dragon.

It was astonishing, exhilarating, and made me laugh and laugh and laugh with joy. I had uncovered the way to negate one assumed reality in order to affirm another! 1

"Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence." — Krishnamurti

The above is from a larger piece K. once wrote in summing up the core of his teachings, as subtext to the main idea that "truth is a pathless land."

"Negation" seems an odd concept, even a difficult one. His words above appear simple and easy to read. To actually negate something, especially if one believes that things exist, may not seem easy, and so one just reads and nods or wonders. K. refers to love, compassion and intelligence. These are not things, and exist outside or beyond thought. When brought together, like separate atoms to make a molecule whereby something else can then descend into the openness as new, they constitute wholeness — which could be said to be health and healing.

What is it that is negated? Thought. Thought is not love, nor can thought create love, for love simply is. Love is the same as I AM. Each of us, then, simply is. K. once elaborated:

"In love there is no attachment; if there is attachment there is no love. There has been the removal of the major factor through negation of what it is not, through the negation of attachment. I know what it means in my daily life: no remembrance of anything my wife, my girl friend, or my neighbour did to hurt me; no attachment to any image thought has created about her; how she has bullied me, how she has given me comfort, how I have had pleasure sexually, all the different things of which the movement of thought has created images; attachments to those images has gone.

".....So, through negation of what is not love, love is. I do not have to ask what love is? I do not have to run after it. If I run after it, it is not love, it is a reward. So I have negated, I have ended, in that enquiry, slowly, carefully, without distortion, withoutillusion, everything that it is not—the other is." (italics mine) 2

It's not my intention to analyze and explain what K. means here, but to emphasize those few things I italicized—"no remembrance of anything", "no attachment to any image", and "without illusion, everything that it (love) is not."

Regarding thought, K. has some guidance:

"So love means freedom from all conflict. It's not a negative state, but negation can lead to the positive....Through thought you cannot achieve the immensity of life."
(Question: So we have to move beyond thought?)
"Yes. Thought is necessary to learn language. To go from here to there, thought is necessary. But psychologically, inwardly, thought has no place."3

I was not led to my particular solution of the problem of healing by negation by K., but by Risen guides and guardians. Their teaching was experiential and achieved by words. K.'s words, however, apply to my experience, and so they are purposeful here.

My particular healing problem materialized as a genetic and chronic neurological condition that was increasingly disrupting the balance of my life, and for many years. It was when the condition began to become disabling that I reached what Gurdjief and Ouspensky might have called the "shock to the next octave" and E. Douglas Fawcett and C. Raynor Johnson would have recognized as an "inducement to novelty". Essentially, I was "forced" (meaning some force pressured me) by having to make a choice between a life-long medication whose side-effects would have eventually created a new disabling— or no medication and endure the condition.

My response was anger, which gave rise to negation of the illusion of the condition — because I said "no." Not "no" to the medication, or even to the condition. I said "no" to the illusion. I negated the attachment, as K. says. The illusion that was my affliction did not exist in my mind anymore. It no longer had my permission to exist. Under the pressure of my anger, I forgot about it. Not only did it not exist anymore, it had never existed. It could never have existed before if it was not to exist now, or ever.

Of course, the illusion returned in a short time. Sometimes partially but usually briefly. If I said "yes" to this in some way, mainly by giving any attention to it, the illusion stayed. If I said "no" to it, it was not. Saying "it is not" also means "it was not," for even to let the ego-mind remember that it "once was" is to acknowledge its existence. "Negation" must be total across all psychological time. Until this approach to the use of mind within manifestation becomes familiar enough to become habitual, one must exercise hyper-vigilant self-awareness to catch the ego-mind's relentless tactics to reintroduce the idea of the condition—until the ego mind has truly forgotten its existence .

In time—meaning several chronological weeks—the condition's brief reappearances got briefer. Now, there are only twinges—which are tendrils of the old belief system—a belief system which was deep enough to have been lodged in my manifestation in such a way to have earned the label "genetic". My not disclosing the name of this condition here is part of negation. This is K.'s negation, which might make more sense now. This negation is also seen in Douglas Adam's quote about how to fly.

Anger is a great motivator, once we can get past judging it and judging oneself and others. It can be the dragon's fire that burns through beliefs that constrict us like vines, control us with guilt, or disable us with disease. Anger energy can take on any number of forms, which means it's up to an individual about how they want to use it. Anger is a message for us to read, a sign pointing in a certain direction; once it has our attention, we do not have to let anger control us; we acknowledge it and let it go. Once the issue is understood, as informed by our anger, we attend to the issue—either supplying nourishment if that's what's called for, or negation, if that's the message.

In the final analysis, negation is what some call "forgiveness"— although truly there is nothing to forgive, nothing to forget.

______________________________________________1 Even A Course in Miracles refers to the ego's "tiny, mad idea at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh" and which consequently gave rise to the world of illusions.2 J. Krishnamurti — A Dialogue With Oneself — from a Discussion Meeting at the Brockwood Part Gathering, August 30, 1977.3 Beyond Thought Meditation Mastery: A Dialogue with Krishnamurti(at New Dimensions Broadcasting Network, 1988).

"Creativity is the principle of novelty. Creativity introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The creative advance is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates. The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the 'many' which it finds and also it is one among the disjunctive ' many' which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively 'many' in process of passage into conjunctive unity... Thus the 'production of novel togetherness' is the ultimate notion embodied in the term concrescence. These ultimate notions of 'production of novelty' and 'concrete togetherness' are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition.-- (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 26)

___________________________________

"Because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
-- Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

___________________________________

"The instrument of thought, which has produced this world that does not work properly, is no longer valid. So perhaps this instrument of thought is worn out. Is there another instrument we can use?" -- Krishnamurti

___________________________________

"...Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song, and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellence of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly."
-- Alfred North Whitehead - English mathematician & philosopher (1861-1947)___________________________________

". . . keeping the Risen concept of weaving in mind, perhaps at this point it can be sensed that what we have before us, from which we are inseparable and as reflected in this book, is a Supreme Tapestry. There appears to be a Very Grand Design which we all follow, either in awareness
or not, co-creatively or not -- recalling that creative means fun. As we weave we are free to make it up as we go along in any way we please, simultaneously staying within the Grand Design as imagined by Higher Imaginals, of whom we an inseparable part. The Grand Design is a work of perfections intermingled with imperfections, solutions with mistakes, and stillness within movement. The Higher Imaginals are many things, but for our purposes here, it suffices to say that they are very advanced and evolved individuals, or Higher Selves."
(from The Risen: Dialogues of Love, Grief & Survival Beyond Death; Chapter 13, Mundus Imaginalis, p. 165).